Be careful what you pay for

This article suggests that you should have to pay for corflutes, junk mail, pamphlets and other bumf whether you like it or not, and whether or not you agree with the message thereon. Furthermore, if you refuse to pay for it, you are committing an offence.

Not that Aaron Gadiel has really thought about it. Gadiel is a Labor hack who's become a PR dolly, someone shunted off the track to parliament who has joined what Christian Kerr calls "the shadow government". While one can't expect Gadiel to have thought too much one shouldn't just accept what he says either, let alone devote a slab of prime media real estate to it with little discernible follow-through.

Traditionally the wider community has respected a person who makes a financial contribution to a cause they believe in. It was admirable for a gentleman or lady of means to give support to civic institutions, including political parties.

Yairs, like good old Tammany Hall and Teapot Dome. No grubbiness about donations in days of old, oh no. And hasn't the Australian Labor Party always been so moderate and temperate in its descriptions of those who contributed to their liberal and conservative opponents.

What mitigates the power of donations is political cynicism - a politician who won't keep promises to voters and taxpayers might not be bound to honour promises for which bribes donations are made.

Now, every time a donation is made, a developer, a miner, an environmentalist, a trade union, a small businessperson, a farmer or anyone else, can have their reputations tarnished by the quick conclusions of cynical individuals.

Not every time, Aaron. The whole reason why people avoid reading the Tele is to avoid hype like that. Donations are made every day and while comments are made from time to time, this is part of the rough-and-tumble of public life. Reputations do not get tarnished by cynical individuals making observations after the fact. Reputations get tarnished by cynical individuals who make donations in the hope that some direct official payback will accrue to them and theirs for doing so.

However, if they all stopped donating tomorrow, our political system would collapse.

This is the core of Gadiel's article, and it's absurd. The proposition in this article is the solution to a non-existent problem. It was here that an annoying article became a joke.

Without funds, political parties would lack the resources to present their message to the public directly.

That didn't stop the Liberal Party in 2007, and this cynical individual has already blogged about that. It will be fascinating to see what they do at the next election, without the advantage of incumbency and no apparent mitigation. Pauline Hanson shows that there is no connection between getting taxpayer funding based on electoral performance and 'getting the message out'. What would happen to public funds given to the Democrats in recent years? Would a government resist the urge to link payments to support for its agenda?

An old saying holds that half of all spending on advertising is wasted, but nobody can tell which half. When resources are scarce, the pressure is on to cut waste and maximise returns on spending. This kind of discipline can be useful in government. Taxation can have a corrosive effect on the economy if politicians view it solely as a guaranteed revenue stream. If politicians experience only upsides from spending as much as (or more than) they get, it is hard for them to seriously embrace notions of fiscal responsibility.

It is not necessarily a bad thing for a political party to experience a falloff in donations; it may even serve as a wake-up call. Doing the reverse may be cynical: I would argue that the Greens' sudden embrace of euthanasia is a way of broadening their revenue base and maintaining profile without necessarily improving public policy.

A loophole allows "political action committees" to be formed to collect contributions and pass it on to favoured candidates. Each presidential campaign typically raises around $US200 million in privately financed donations.

Despite the US ban on corporate donations American voters appear even more cynical than Australians about the integrity of their political system.

That would be the "loophole", Aaron, the pathetic hope that nobody would notice that the legislation had been subverted.

Parties should be funded by taxpayers based on their electoral performance. This would require a massive increase in the public funding of political parties.

Well, so much for that idea. I'm not going to pay for that and you aren't either. I think more money should be spent on schools, not whatever it is that Bri-Lo or Karl Bitar do.

A ban of this kind will, once and for all, remove any perception of favouritism in all areas of government decision-making, including tender processes, licensing, approvals and board appointments.

The opposite of this is true. Gadiel seriously wants the governing party to be funded by politicians of that party, as well as for them to control funding to their opponents. At the risk of being disrespectful, stuff that.

Some cynics may find it surprising that developers would back a reform of this kind.

Some cynics would find it easier to make an outrageous claim if they get away with describing all their opponents as "cynics".

Political corruption involves recycling taxpayer funds for partisan or personal gain. This proposition does not address the core issue: what do you want this money for, and what do we get in return? Whatever we get, it won't be democracy, it won't be a clearer idea of what we're voting for, and no will it be better development of an urban environment. What it will mean is more people like Aaron Gadiel, better paid and even more brazen in demanding public money for which there is no public benefit.

NSW needs developers to keep building whether political donations are made or not.

Why even bother with the funding of political parties? Why would you guarantee organisations a constant revenue stream that no private business enjoys? There has to be a reason why the Urban Taskforce has lifted its eyes from the task of developing real estate, and after reading Gadiel's piece it's not clear what it might be.

Red, white and Roskam

If you love a bit of straw man work, you can't go past John Roskam's latest:

Australians are starting to realise that maybe America is not so bad after all.

Australians never thought it was. Study after study has shown that there's real affection for the USA in Australia - sure, tinged with occasional frustration and despair/mocking poor choices, but these are characteristics of all real and deep friendships.

Most commentators on the US have been blinded by their contempt, and in some cases their hatred, of George Bush.

21,000,000 Australians, John: you'd be surprised how few are commentators, or have their political opinions shaped by commentators.

So far those same commentators haven't acknowledged that the country that gave the world George Bush, might also give it Barack Obama.

Depends who you mean by "those commentators", John. I'd call you a commentator, and I'd probably have to wear the accusation were it flung back. It's easy to acknowledge that the country that gave us Eugene V Debs also gave us Curtis LeMay, John F Kennedy/Lee Harvey Oswald, Ludwig van Beethoven/Heinrich Himmler, do your own false dichotomy.

Were Obama somehow to become president ...

Uh, by winning a plurality of votes in the Electoral College?

... we can be guaranteed more paeans of praise.

Yeah, because when the United States elects a new President they tend to be fairly laid back about it, lukewarm about the new guy, etc.

One immediate result of his election in Australia would be that our Australian political parties would be forced to start looking for their own Obama. Charisma would be back in fashion.

The demand for charisma isn't the problem, it's the supply, John. Anyway, "forced" is too strong: the Rudd Government would take to an Obama Administration with little apparent difficulty. Which other (state/territory) government in this country would be destabilised by an Obama Administration in Washington? Is there a charismatic politician in state/territory politics, and if so who?

If Obama or Hillary Clinton becomes president, America's critics will be forced to think again. The American people won't be able to be written off as an assemblage of religion-obsessed, gun-toting, rednecks.

Again, John, nobody does. The Bush Administration has crafted its message to appeal to said people though, and it has been re-elected twice. The commentary I've read is that the outfit that gave rise to Dicks Cheney and Perle, amongst others, is some sort of dastardly trick against an otherwise decent people.

Most likely, America will come to be regarded as the repository of all that is enlightened, liberal, and tolerant.

I wouldn't say all, John. It should, however, display more of these qualities in its foreign and other policies than have been apparent for the past eight years or so.

a country can't be judged by its leader. As much as any elected politician would like to be able to speak for "everyone", the reality is that they cannot.

When a person reveals their nationality, their position on the leadership of that country and perceptions thereof become part of who they are. Australians may or may not vote for John Howard, and may or may not have participated in, say, Tampa or SIEV-X, but it is fair for foreigners to ask Australians about the sort of country that would do such things.

Americans also regard themselves as living in a classless and egalitarian society. Whether that's true or not is hardly the point. What matters is that it is believed to be true.

Actually, it is. If a country is governing itself according to principles that no longer apply, it is kidding itself.

The fact that the population of the US is 15 times larger than Australia's only partly explains the differences between the countries ... Australia has had 26 prime ministers. Every one of them has been a male of Anglo-Celtic background.

Never mind larger, the population of the US has always been a lot more diverse than that of Australia. Until World War II Anglo-Celtic Australians made up well over 90% of the population, so it was almost inevitable that the Prime Minister at any point throughout should share this characteristic: a characteristic shared by McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Clinton. Australians have had as many female Prime Ministers as the US has had female Presidents.

It's difficult to imagine any Australian political party allowing anyone who is not a party member to have a say in that party's selection of candidates for office. Yet this is precisely what happens in the US.

Sure it is, it's called a branch-stack. You don't think the far right of the Liberal Party in NSW get their candidates up on their sensible opinions and broad community engagement, do you? The primaries process renders political parties irrelevant.

If a John Roskam article doesn't stand up to the kind of feeble scrutiny applied above, it should not be published. Whether you are the editor of The Age or John Roskam, it is time to reassess the value of a John Roskam article in better understanding the world in which everyone except John Roskam lives.

The thin edge

This article was published in 2008 but could have been written at any time over the past decade. It's almost Howard-Costello in its sheer lameness.

But the fact is, problems remain with the practicalities of an apology. Getting it right is more important than getting it done in the first week of Parliament. Labor’s indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jenny Macklin acknowledged this today when she refused to put a deadline on saying sorry.

A few weeks ago, Sam, she announced that the consultation process could take months, and that it was inextricable from practical measures such as the NT intervention.

And practical responses to Aboriginal disadvantage will ultimately deliver more lasting solutions than pretty words.

Any suggestions as to what these might be? Any examples you can point to?

On a grubbier note, the great Sorry debate should also provide a fascinating opportunity for the new Labor government to turn the tables and “wedge” the battered Liberal opposition, who used the issue of an apology for years to divide and conquer the ALP.

Now, it is the Liberals who remain divided over the issue, which flared during the recent leadership vote and ultimately played a role in denying Mr Turnbull the top job.

Can you imagine people who might be even more directly affected by this issue, such as actual Aborigines? What do they think? What do you mean, you didn't ask them?

“Well, this whole question of a formal apology, I think the proponents, no less than the opponents, are getting hung up on semantics,’’ Mr Abbott said last year.

“Because, let’s face it, back in 1999 the parliament unanimously carried a resolution of profound and sincere regret about the various mistakes that had been made in terms of indigenous policy over the years.

“So who is playing word games here? This apology ... I would like to see precisely what words the incoming Government is proposing, because finding a form of words that is acceptable to everyone is going to be an extraordinarily difficult business. One of the other issues is going to be trying to find a form of words that doesn’t look like it’s an admission of legal liability.”

Let's be clear: Abbott said all that last year. These remarks were reported at the time and inserted into the political context of that time. You'd expect today's pap(er) to reflect the (very different) political context of today - unless, of course, you were an Australian reader. There is no indication that Brendan Nelson or anyone else in the Liberal Party is in violent disagreement with any of that (apart from, perhaps, Bronwyn Bishop or her mini-me, Sophie Mirabella). So much for "Libs divided over ‘Sorry’", Sam.

All Liberals, and everyone else too, can agree that the "resolution of profound and sincere regret" in 1999 made bugger-all difference to anyone and anything.

This article relies on stale information and stale assumptions (i.e. that wedging the Liberals is somehow important). It also assumes that symbolism can be divorced from practical measures, at the very time when everyone who works in and with Aboriginal communities agrees that it absolutely can't. For all their differences, the unity of symbolism and practicality is the one thing they agree on: so why is it an issue, why worth investigating with the eagle eye of Samantha Maiden, why now?

The articles we need now are about how to unify the symbolism and the reality of Aborigines in Australian society. You'll need people to think about that and depart from tired old standpoints that haven't really worked for anyone (except, perhaps, John Howard). It seems that you won't get that from Samantha Maiden or her employer.

"I have not changed my mind"

It isn't Peter Costello's fault that Jason Koutsoukis' life and career lack meaning in 2008, but of course Jase thinks otherwise.

Peter Costello ... might do well to reflect on what his true vocation is.

I think he's done that already, Jase:

... a note from the man himself on Friday afternoon was emphatic: "I have not changed my mind. Not at all. What I said on Nov 25 stands. Yours faithfully, Peter Costello."

That should have killed the story stone dead. Costello is a lawyer, as if he'd commit something like that to paper if there was any possibility it could be used against him. It's interesting that as soon as this rumour took off around Parliament, Costello - a man with experience of the Parliamentary rumour mill - went straight to Jase. You should have dropped this non-story and written something else, Jase.

It's difficult to imagine the people of Higgins would begrudge him a briefly less hectic schedule.

His job is to represent them in Parliament, Jase. The people of Bennelong have shown what happens to MPs who are too busy for MP duties.

Yet it turned out that he was faking it and pretty soon afterwards it was Nixon who was kicking around the press as president of the United States.

It was six years between Nixon's gubernatorial loss and his presidential victory, Jase, so this column is half a decade ahead of its time. The American system does allow for people to go in and out of politics, and Nixon did spend most of the '60s as a lawyer in New York. Besides, Nixon's is not the sort of career you'd wish on anyone.

Right at this moment, Costello is said to have suffered a rather unhappy few months. Having woken up every day since he was about 20 thinking he would one day be prime minister, he's said to have been feeling rather shattered at the thought that this will not come to pass.

So you'd argue that the guy needs to stop moping and get on with his life? What do you mean, no?

Over the course of his political career, Costello proved that he was very good at several things, including being funny in Parliament, sulking when he didn't get his own way, and being totally risk-averse. Hardly the things you need to run a business.

Hardly sufficient to leading the Opposition, or becoming Prime Minister.

The former Adelaide doctor Andrew Southcott traded a promising career as a surgeon for a seat in Parliament.

You could argue that the health system needs every surgeon it can get. Mind you, if you're holding up Southcott's political career as an indication of what he'd be like as a surgeon, perhaps it's for the best.

Nothing outside of politics will ever feel as good as standing at the dispatch box, ridiculing his opponents and dreaming about what he would do with the top job if he ever got the chance.

Yeah, he could become a national joke like Wilson Tuckey. The one thing the Liberals have is economic credibility: the stock market is tanking and inflation is starting to bite, so now is the time for Peter Costello to be very, very quiet. Labor in government are unlikely to be the sullen little mice they were under Beazley, and Costello may prove to be as ineffective in Opposition as Abbott or Nelson.

The landscape has changed, Jase, and you are no longer able to report on it (if you ever were). Costello has given it away and members of the "coterie", like you, should too.

Gimme some journalism

A new government has taken office, and we still know little about what it's planning. We know little because there have been so few articles in the media. There have been so few articles because there have been so few announcements. The media only respond to announcements; the only investigative journalism taking place at the moment are those in the United States staking out the flat where an actor died or the house of a drug-addled former singer. There is plenty to be found out in a new government, where uncertainty is high and loyalty to the incumbents low. The older journalists in Canberra are too lazy to go looking for stories; the younger ones don't know how.

It's tempting to tie the demise of The Bulletin into this, but it was never big on investigative journalism. It was said that Kerry Packer maintained it for sentimental reasons, but it's also true that he wanted to keep it from asking questions he didn't want asked. It was this latter motivation, control and paranoia, that was most important in its latter years and the slow-acting poison that killed it.

Peter Coleman wrote:

The Bulletin may have been able to survive as a literary-political review of modest circulation. But as a weekly news magazine it was suffocated in cyberspace and the blogosphere.

The idea that there was no market for a news/current affairs magazine in Australia has been invalidated by the rise of The Monthly, New Matilda, Crikey, The Diplomat, Griffith Review, Eureka Street and others. At its best The Bulletin was large enough to contain these multitudes, and its own contradictions. ACP magazines could have kept it going if it had wanted to.

Just because Coleman could not have tamed the unruly technologies to which he refers doesn't mean that nobody could have. Australia is a bigger place than it was in Coleman's day, less able to be summed up within one magazine no matter how "bumper". He's right about Newsweek, though. Apart from the odd useful insight into US primaries or foreign policy, it was poor stuff.

Today it is one of those smaller magazines that are most likely to break the big exposes in coming years. The Fairfax broadsheets seem only big enough to take on their state governments, but only when they have gone as rancid as the Iemma government has. This piece by Mark Coultan is exactly the sort of thing that Bob Carr should have copped on a weekly, if not daily, basis during his lazy decade in office. It actually addresses real public policy issues and the nature of governance. This is the very sort of thing that political journalism should be all about.

Well disconnected

The one thing a press gallery groupie journalist needs is political connections. Like many Victorians, Jason Koutsoukis spent a while lot of time snuggling up to Peter Costello in the hope that he might prove a useful source.

When it came time for real news, like his decision not to contest the vacated Liberal Party leadership, Costello wasn't much use to Our Jase, and all those tidbits proved a poor diet. Now he's been stitched up again.

This article is a great example of poor journalism: "... is set to be ... is likely to ... One cabinet minister who asked not to be named [even though you already had, Jase]". Hours later, it was clear that Jase had been set up.

Never mind that it's not even April Fool's Day: anything that appears from now on under the byline "Jason Koutsoukis" is not only likely to be poorly written but to be sheer and utter crap. He's been set up gutless, the Aunt Sally of the Canberra press gallery. Fairfax stood by him this time, but how long can they keep doing so?

Backwards and forwards

The exchange between Bob White and Christopher Pearson demonstrates nothing so much as a failure of liberals and conservatives to capture the high intellectual ground, a failure that impoverishes us all.

Academics are asked to become marketers: to cultivate business relations with educational institutes overseas, to set up transient money-generating courses, to conduct expensive offshore recruitment campaigns, all of which have nothing to do with quality education and everything to do with short-term replacement of lost revenue from government investment.

This has always been true. Australian universities have a long tradition of importing foreign academics - Australian-born academics like Manning Clark or Howard Florey were in the minority in Australian universities. Those who were not educated at European universities were made to feel inferior. There has always been international co-operation on projects and in appointments.

This also implies that reduced government funding to universities is some temporary phase, and that it should and shall return to a situation where high public funding is the norm. Rather a sad set of assumptions, really.

Alongside the systematic and planned financial squeeze, the Howard government pursued an unprecedented onslaught on the time-honoured ideal of academic teaching and research that is independent of political and commercial interests. Successive ministers for education, Brendan Nelson in particular, intervened to micro-manage academics' activities.

Well, of course. The left had Marcuse and de Beauvoir encouraging young lefties to get into academe with their ears pinned back in order to achieve the aims of Bolshevism: to have a small minority hijack massed workers' movements. The left were the only organised force in higher education, and all industries of that political stripe (e.g. community services, the waterfront) just get relentlessly screwed by governments of all types.

Liberals and conservatives abandoned the field. Strangely, Pearson blames Menzies for not thinking this through and not taking all classes personally:

... it's time for a critical look at Menzies' contribution to higher education. Some readers may be surprised to learn that I think it was little short of catastrophic.

The Australian economy would not have the opportunities available to it today without the expansion of its education facilities a generation ago. The capacity constraints facing the economy today centre largely on too little education rather than too much: Pearson betrays his Maoist roots - a common affliction amongst flatulent reactionaries these days - by implying that your PhD student in womyn's deconstructionism might be more usefully employed on a factory line.
I could talk about the non-economic benefits of education, but the effete elite he would appeal to (and consider himself part) ought take that as given.

But it was obvious to anyone who'd ever managed a business, let alone chaired a faculty, that sudden, very rapid expansion and a funding bonanza was more likely than not to compromise the quality of teaching and academic standards along with ideals such as "the disinterested pursuit of knowledge".

It was the responsibility of liberal academics to ensure that didn't happen, to ensure that the deluge of money and students didn't sweep them off their feet. Anyone who's ever managed a business, let alone chaired a faculty, knows that you have to plan carefully and keep to your principles, and not just blame the remote figure of the Prime Minister for not getting down to this level of detail.

Kingsley Amis, the author of Lucky Jim, is credited with the aphorism that sums up the problem of a burgeoning tertiary education sector: "More almost always means worse." To some this will seem no more than typical Tory negativity and an anti-democratic defence of scholarly elites and their privileges. I think it's an argument for preserving educational standards

Nobody is in a position to posit that slow wet fart as an argument for anything. It's like having a skulling contest in defence of your football team, it's just a nonsense.

Even granting, for argument's sake, that universities in the mid-'50s excluded significant numbers of people who deserved the opportunity, only the most starry-eyed enthusiasts could have imagined that creating three times as many places in very short order wouldn't have significantly lowered the average IQ of undergraduates.

The idea was not to lower the IQ of undergaduates. The idea was to have more Australians - and people from neighbouring countries - equipped with a university education. The numbers of people who might benefit from such an education, and who might pass those benefits onto others, is not as fixed as Pearson still thinks it is. Living in Adelaide is no excuse: what does it take to shake this ignorant man out of the notion that Australian social, economic and political structures in 2008 are essentially the same as they were in 1958, or 1938?

Meanwhile, the government hooked public funding for higher education tightly to the sector's obedience to workplace "reforms" that consisted mainly of demands that academics comply with tedious and often ludicrously petty requirements of reporting, record-keeping, form-filling and data-entry, which have accomplished nothing more than a widespread exasperation in the higher education sector and have reduced the overall capacity for innovative research.

Quite so. A more politically diverse university sector could have resisted the control-freaks more successfully than they have. Take note and move forward.

The mid-'60s were the time when the Left really entrenched itself, especially in the humanities and social sciences faculties in Australian universities. By the end of the decade, conservatives and apolitical scholars were becoming notably thin on the ground.

Always be suspicious when a strident statement is made in the passive voice.

The Young Liberals was tens of thousands strong at this time: why no encouragement to a life of academia? Why no scholarships to reward the sort of scholarship that might lead a bright student toward liberal and conservative leanings? Where were the courses on Popper, for example? Why did only student politicians make use of the conservative redoubts of residential colleges?

Ideologues of any persuasion are inclined to exercise the powers of patronage to further the careers of their political allies, with academic ability a secondary consideration.

Clearly, not conservative or liberal ideologues.

It was surely no accident that in the mid-'60s the Left began to abandon the conventions of civil disagreement, especially on the newer campuses. Howling down ideological enemies and encouraging your students to do the same became the norm.

This was only possible because there were so few of them. Liberals and conservatives abandoned those who performed the most vital tasks of public employees in the 1960s: those who fought in Vietnam and those who taught at universities. This is a matter of not just systematic failure, but ongoing disgrace.

To be fair to White, many of the issues he complains about happened after Menzies' time. It is quaint to see him complain about the retro-fit of IT facilities in old buildings, but worse - it detracts from his arguments about aspects of teaching and research that remain timeless, which might support to some extent a back-to-Menzies agenda.

They both seem to agree that a basic rethink of what universities are for, and what role government can/should do, is in order. White is wrong in asserting that Menzies and Whitlam had the right idea but hey man, Pearson is like so lame in his assertion that the past is gone and nothing can be learned from it.

This exchange has served to show that "balance" is not what we need in media commentary: left and right can be equally lame and cancel each other out.